Ph.D. John D. PALMER

CV

Biological Rhythms in Intertidal Organisms
General lab interests are invertebrate development, behavior, and cyclic displays. For the last ten years our emphasis has been on the rhythms and living clocks of shore-dwelling animals, mainly crabs and pelecypods. The work is carried out in marine labs scattered around the world, especially the Portobello Lab in New Zealand. The Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts serves as home base. We are trying to decipher just what kind of horologue governs organismic rhythms that match the period of the tides. Using new ways to approach the problem we have described several heretofore unknown properties of tide-associated rhythms, and from these findings have produced a circalunidian-clock hypothesis that is now gaining favor.